Faculty Profile

Harriet MacMillan

Harriet MacMillan is a psychiatrist and pediatrician conducting family violence research. She is a Distinguished University Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences, and Pediatrics at McMaster University with associate membership in the Department of Health Research Methods, Evidence, and Impact. Harriet holds the Chedoke Health Chair in Child Psychiatry.

Harriet's research focuses on the epidemiology of violence against children and women; she has led randomized controlled trials evaluating the effectiveness of approaches to preventing child maltreatment and intimate partner violence. Funding for this work has been provided by organizations such as the WT Grant Foundation, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Harriet is a co- principal investigator of the PreVAiL (Preventing Violence Across the Lifespan) Network, initially funded by CIHR and currently funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada. Through PreVAiL, Harriet works closely with organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO).

From 1993 until 2004, Harriet was the founding Director of the Child Advocacy and Assessment Program (CAAP) at McMaster Children’s Hospital, a multidisciplinary program committed to reducing the burden of suffering associated with family violence. She continues to see patients as an active staff member of CAAP and provides consultations to child protection agencies.

Nurse Family Partnership Curriculum - a multi-site randomized controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness of an IPV curriculum embedded in the Nurse Family Partnership (NFP)

British Columbia Healthy Connections Project (BCHCP) - a province-wide randomized controlled trial of the NFP in BC to determine the program’s effectiveness within the Canadian context (funded by the BC Ministry of Health and BC Ministry of Children and Family Development)

Healthy Foundations Study – an adjunct study of the BCHCP, examining the impact of a preventive home visitation intervention on biological outcomes in infants across the first two years of life (funded by CIHR)

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